Three customers more than double monthly data use within year

Contract customers using an average of 1.1GB a month, compared to the 450MB average used during the summer months last year

Three’s contract customers have doubled their monthly data use to1.1GB, compared to the 450MB average a month used last summer.

Subscribers using Apple iPhones and high-end Android smartphones are using almost 1.5GB of data a month. Three said this is significantly more than the allowances of 1GB or less sold to 68 per cent of the UK’s smartphone users on competing networks.

Three CEO David Dyson (pictured) said: “With 95 per cent of our smartphone customers using data on a daily basis, everyone is relying more than ever on their handset to do all the stuff they used to do on the internet at home or work. And there is no sign of this slowing down.

“Give consumers a combination of the right device, the right price plan and a mobile network built for the internet and you see a rapid behavioural shift. We are seeing more and more people using more and more data throughout the day.

“Price plans that remove the fear of going over a data limit enable demand to grow as consumers are free to discover just how much they can do on the move. Even I don’t understand how much data I use on a daily basis so it’s no surprise that having an all you can eat worry-free data package is proving to be so popular with our customers.”

Three chief operating officer Graham Baxter said: “Since 2008 we have invested over £1 billion in almost doubling the size of our network and boosting its capacity and quality in order to handle this data traffic explosion.

“Today we have an award-winning network and it’s the only network in the UK that’s built specifically for the mobile internet. We cover 98% of the UK’s population and it’s great to see that our customers are doing so much more of the things they enjoy on their smartphones.”